Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

The sounds of the plane’s distress intruded. The nearly industrial soundtrack of man-made materials exceeding their mechanical limits, popping and cracking, the urgent scraping of metal against metal. He should be thinking of Sherri, but it was his mother that became his primary concern, and why wouldn’t it be this way now that he was going to die? The ways in which his mother depended on him had always been a source of tension in his marriage, and now his sense of duty, of fealty, had brought him here to the very end of his time.

All these passengers with thoughts circling around one common idea— What on earth? What is that noise? —followed by a collective sense of relief as the plane leveled at flight level seven-zero, seven thousand feet, and the first officer announced that oxygen masks were no longer necessary. In the chaos, no one had told him that the masks had never deployed. Ash took a moment to chastise himself for being so dramatic.

A flurry of activity at the head of the cabin, the following of well-ordered procedures from a trio of memorized checklists. Navigator Chuck Belk shouted, This is Panorama 503 declaring an emergency! Tower control asked something about the stick, and Captain Williston did not hear the question; he focused only on his duty, announced they would try for runway 13L. Belk realized the captain hadn’t transmitted the request to land, so he asked for clearance, told the tower to have the fire trucks ready to lay down a marshmallow of foam. We’re coming in hard and heavy, Belk told flight control, and even he didn’t know what he meant.

Bill Zimmer, first officer, fought with his stick, interpreted the warning lights and the cacophony of alarms to mean total hydraulic failure. He exhaled audibly, the noise picking up over the microphones of the flight-deck headset. Runway 13L was the short one. Captain Williston made some quick calculations about the glide path and, realizing that Flight 503 was still too hot and powered up, pulled the stick back hard. The plane gave faint response, enough to suggest hope. “We’re going to be fine, ladies,” he said. Zimmer exhaled again, the sound amplified through his headset, and Williston knew that he was trying only to control his physical response to pressure. All three of the cockpit crew had learned certain coping techniques in the military and would do anything to keep their blood pressure down; in the quick drop, they’d all probably taken three Gs, enough to force all the wind out of your lungs and even make you empty your bladder if you were caught unawares. Williston tried to match Zimmer’s metronomic breathing, a short inhalation, a deep, cleansing exhalation. On his second inhalation, the stick began to respond, and Williston exhaled hugely, with a cough, in premature relief. The unmistakable sound of popping rivets, little staccato explosions, followed immediately, then sudden sideslip, the plane taking a hard and unplanned bank to the left.

For Mary Beth Blumenthal, in 26C, there would be no sudden realizations in this moment, just a gradual awareness, as if Death had taken a seat in 26B, produced from its attaché a package of cheese crackers with peanut butter and begun with the kind of small talk so familiar on airplanes, the who-are-yous and where-are-you-froms and where-you-headeds. Now only the sounds of a plane reaching its mechanical limits and, in the cabin, a woeful silence. Time took on its well-reported elastic qualities.

Mary Beth began to pray. She had not managed Mass or the confession of her sins in a decade. She interrupted her own prayer to try to calculate the last time she had set foot among the good offices of the Catholic Church. She was thinking she might say whatever she could remember of the rosary. The words themselves, their unsettling familiarity, surprised her. She found in them comfort, as they had been the mantra that ushered her to sleep for the first twenty years of her life. How logical, then, that the prayer she repeated was the Hail Mary, because mothers, whether through history or experience, are inexorably tied to their children.

Through her sweater her fingers sought out the ampleness of her gut. She pushed her hands under the thin fabric to touch the small stretch marks that surrounded her navel in an almost symmetrical radius, like the darker green stripes in a summer watermelon. Now she dragged her hand across her stomach, just above her waist, the same places where Gabriel’s feet had kicked her from the inside, the striations where her abdomen had grown impossibly elastic and inflated. Richard had come to the hospital and fed her ice chips and wet a washcloth for her head and had generally performed the duties of her absent husband, and she wished now that she had taken his hand and placed it there, on her belly, encouraged him to follow the highways that appeared on her lower abdomen, asked him to rub lotions into the marks to tame their angry redness. Where her brother was concerned, there were a lot of things she wished she’d done. Then and now.

She’d been just old enough to regard him as a nuisance, a thing to be tolerated. As a boy, he seemed to have so little to protect him from the world other than his brains, and she told herself then that it was not her concern if he were to head out into the world unarmored. Then Lew was dead, and everything turned, as if the entire family could be identified only by their relationship to the deceased. And now the same thing would happen to her son. Now, she thought only of who might tell Gabriel about it, and here for the first time she thought the words: the crash. Someday he would stand in a field and gaze upon the site of his mother’s death. Richard would bring Gabriel here and hold his hand; they would come to the site like accident reconstructors, like the assassination buffs who climbed to the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository and squeezed off shots from an imaginary Mannlicher carbine. Richard would have to put his boots on the ground. She knew her brother that well.

Now she was thinking of her son, his six years, those early days with his persistent fussing, the vocalizations that she had to learn to decipher. Her brother had been in the birthing room, not her husband. He’d rested a hand on her stomach through the paper-thin dressing gown. He’d been the first to hold her son. She could picture them both, Richard’s unruly hair flopped across his forehead, the same undulating cowlick that would poke forward in Gabriel’s thick mop.

The pilot’s stashed briefcase escaped from under the jump seat. The navigator tried to heel it back into place.

Captain Williston knew the jet’s slide to be uncorrectable now—they would die—but still he worried only about work. Figuring out the cause was a job for later. He didn’t have adequate training for this, and there was certainly going to be a lawsuit, though it would have no bearing on him. Part of the mantle of responsibility meant that every time he was in the first seat, he knew there was a chance that he might make a mistake, that his epitaph, as written by the various investigating authorities, might be reduced to two words: pilot error.

He couldn’t think of any possible explanation for what was happening, the loss of power, the rudder swinging like a barn door, left, then right, then left again. As the airframe reached its maximum tolerance for stress, it suddenly became imperative to Williston that he develop a working theory of his own death. Cause and effect. Meanwhile, Captain Grady Williston, fifty-five, of Westlake, Texas, was about to become the only person onboard Panorama Airlines Flight 503 mentioned by name in every news article, every initial bulletin of the crash.

The noise then of metal being stressed, then the final severing of steel control cables. The fan disk of engine three, mounted on the tail assembly, broke from its moorings, and its shrapnel penetrated the cowling, the fuselage, shearing the last pinions that kept the rudder secured.